Sam Smith - Healthwise, I've lived a charmed life. Except for a brief bout of cancer and a weightlifting accident I've been blessed with few colds, stomach aches or other medical annoyances. So, as I reach the age of 83, I find myself ill prepared for the intrusion of arthritis. I take the normal curative steps, including physical therapy, albeit avoiding the TV ad sponsored drugs with their legal disclaimer that, should I use them, I may commit suicide, fall down stairs or lose all my teeth. But as a hard hitting investigative journalist I can tell when professionals have no real answer and would rather deal with something they can actually solve, like a heart attack.
In fact, the Mayo Clinic notes online: "No cure for psoriatic arthritis exists, so the focus is on controlling symptoms and preventing damage to your joints."
Not even religion seems to help. The Daily Mail reported today:
Bouts of 'persistent pain' caused by sciatica forced Pope Francis to miss Sunday Mass and to suspend his other engagements. The Vatican said on Saturday that 84-year-old Francis is making limited appearances due to sciatica, a nerve inflammation that affects the lower back and legs.
If a Pope has to deal so poorly with pains in the same place as me, what can a Seventh Day Agnostic expect?
Then
a metaphor hit me. The work of medical science is not unlike that of my
car repair shop, which can fix my brakes, replace the tires and so
forth, but otherwise leaves my vehicle the old car it is. For medicine,
we have had great solutions affecting the heart, cancer, stomachs and so
forth, but the larger body remains just an old thing getting older.
To check this thesis, I looked up the life expectancy of humans. 31 in 1900, 48 in 1950 and 72 in 2017. In other words, we were given bodies not designed to benefit fully from medical advances because science only fixed specific parts. The greater body still deteriorates at a largely uncontrolled level.
I don't know the
solution. Will my grandchildren be able to get plastic replacement
spines? Who knows? But it would nice if someone won a Nobel Prize for
fixing our bodies and not just what's inside them. The Pope and I would
be grateful.
